Pirate Cinema (41 page)

"Course," I said.

The video was only a minute and a half long -- I'd based it off footage from an anti-piracy ad they made you sit through before every film -- and Katarina spent the next ninety seconds laughing her head off at the video. Before I could say anything, she ran it through again.

"It's very, very good," she said. "I mean, absolutely marvelous. I know Grandad would have loved this -- it's so up his street. Speaking of which --" She opened her desk drawer and pulled out a couple of old thumb-drives emblazoned with the logos of an office supply store. "I loaded one of these up with a bunch of Grandad's remixes, and the other one with some of my favorite family films. Stuff the public never saw -- Grandad just being himself, not 'Scot Colford.' Thought you'd appreciate it."

My hands shook as I took them. "Katarina, I --" I took a deep breath and made myself calm down. "Listen, you can't know how much this means to someone like me. You know there's a whole legion of people like me who are mad for your Grandad's work -- when someone discovers a rarity, like one of the Japanese adverts he did or some outtakes from a film, it's like gold. It's cos every clip opens up the chance to make a whole world of new creations, films and stuff. It's like we're chemists discovering a new element or something." I grinned. "You know, I only know about chemists and elements because of Scot's Mendeleev film,
Elemental Discovery
."

She raised her eyebrows. "Even I don't know that one."

"Oh," I said, "well, it's quite rare. The Open Society Institute funded it as part of an educational series for the Caribbean. Most of them weren't very good, but
Elemental Discovery
is really brilliant. It's dead funny, too. I can get you a copy, if you'd like."

"Sure," she said. "I'd love to see it. You know, I really struggled with chemistry at uni. I had no idea Grandad knew anything about the subject."

"I don't think he did, really. He did an interview with Sky where he said he needed to do dozens of retakes because he couldn't keep the element names straight in his head."

"How do you know all this stuff?"

I shrugged. "You can't really make films by remixing them unless you know a lot about them. Whenever I watch a video, I'm looking for dialog or shots or effects or cuts that I can use in one of mine. It feels like I'm picking up pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that's been scattered all over the shop, and maybe it's three or four puzzles, or dozens of them, even, and I don't have the box and I don't know what piece goes with which puzzle. But every now and again, I'll find an edge or even a corner and a big piece of it snaps together into a video. Then I sit down and cut and edit and hunt down missing bits and reconsider things, and if I'm lucky, I end up with a bit of video that looks like the film I've got in my head."

"Gosh, it sounds like a lot of work. Don't take this the wrong way, but wouldn't it be simpler to pick up a camera and shoot the stuff that you want?"

I squirmed a little. I hated this question. "I don't know. Maybe I will, someday. But when I started, I was just a little kid, and I didn't know any grown-ups who would act for me, even if I had sets and all that. So I cut up what I could find, trying to get at that thing I could see in my mind's eye. Now I've been doing it for so long, it feels like cheating if I make my own thing. You know what it's like? There's this arsey, posh estate agent's near Old Street Station, Foxton's. They have this enormous sculpture in the window, a kind of huge moving thing made out of old silver spoons and other bits of Victorian cutlery and plates and china, and it's all geared up with old bike chains, and they make it all whirl around in this kind of crazy dance. The first time I saw it, I was completely taken away by it -- not just because it's beautiful, but because I was so impressed with the idea that someone had found the beauty that was in all these bits of junk that they'd found lying around. It was like they'd unlocked something wonderful and hidden away, like the most wonderful diamond in history pulled out of the muck.

"Every time I passed by, I stopped to look at it and appreciate it. Then, one day, one of the estate agents came out, a big mucker in a camel-hair coat and shiny shoes and a silk scarf, and he said, 'You're always staring at that, hey? It's nice. You can hardly tell that all that stuff isn't real.'

"As soon as he said it, I could see it -- every plate, every spoon and fork, they were all made of plastic. No one had excavated all this junk from a charity shop and made something brilliant out of it. They'd just sent off to China for a bunch of pre-made, injection-molded rubbish, just like you would if you wanted a load of plastic Christmas trees or artificial flowers. And though it was still pretty, it wasn't anything like the miracle I'd thought it was. It was just a clever little toy, not a work of art.

"When I make a film by finding real parts lying around, waiting to be shifted and shunted and twisted into place to make something new, it
feels real
. Like I've done something that no one else could quite make. When I started using a bit of computer generated stuff to fill in around the edges, it felt like a real cheat and it took me ages to get comfortable with it. Every now and again, I think about maybe making a film with a camera and that, but it just seems like if I did that, I'd have to get so many other people to cooperate with me, get the actors to say the lines the way I want them to, get the set designers to make the sets that I want them to make -- Well, it just feels like it'd be so much bother, if that makes sense."

"I can't say I ever thought of it that way, but I suppose it makes some sense after all," she said. She looked at the time on her computer screen. "Whoops! That's time. It was a real pleasure to meet you, Mr. DeVil. Now, did I understand that you were thinking that you might use some of those clips of Grandad in some new films?"

"Oh!" I said hastily, "yes, well, only if you don't mind, I mean --"

"Stop," she said. "No, I don't mind in the slightest. It just never occurred to me that you'd think of those clips as
footage
. They're just, well, memories for me. I think it'd be marvelous if you gave them a second life in one of your creations. Yes, please do."

I almost hugged her. I settled for shaking her hand and tripping out of the office on a cloud. I didn't even mind when an errant green laser from some tourist's mosquito-zapper caught me just below my eye, giving me a little scorch. The tourist -- an American girl who was quite pretty, though badly dressed -- was very apologetic and made a little show of fawning over me, which was rather nice, and well worth the minor burn.

Gregory the solicitor had put the fear of the law in me, and so I refrained from posting my new Scot clip -- the one I'd shared with his actual granddaughter, who'd shook my actual hand! -- even though I was busting to show it around. Instead, I spent the week going to TIP-Ex rallies, taking coaches and trains all over England and Wales to attend the local rallies and shake hands and make little speeches. A TIP-Ex campaigner from the Green Party had heard me griping about not being able to afford the travel to get to these events and he'd bought me a month-long rail pass out of his own pocket, and I was determined to make it worth his while by going to as many of the crapping things as I could get to.

It was well worth it, too. I'd be in Milton Keynes one day, and I'd meet some little gang of media hackers who needed help getting inside the Open University to campaign there, and the next day I'd meet an OU prof at a demo in Loughborough and I'd pass on her details to the Milton Keynes crowd. I found that I was building up a mental database of people who needed to meet other people and so I created a message board on Confusing Peach, which had gone public and turned into a hub for the movement. But even with the message board, I was still always finding people who didn't know that they needed to meet someone, or hadn't thought of it. It got so I'd be dozing on a long coach ride and I'd be jolted awake by the realization that
this guy
really needed to talk to
that guy
right away and I'd whip out my lappie and start sending round e-mails.

I missed 26 like fire, of course, but it was better this way: she was revising like mad for her A levels, and finishing off her last papers, and arguing with her parents about what uni she should go to next year. She was lobbying to take a year or two off to work and save money and generally arse around and figure out what she wanted from life, which sounded eminently sensible to me. Her parents disagreed.

I came back to London at 2:00 A.M. the night before the hearing on my injunction. I'd found a passable suit -- five years out of date, but approximately my size, and not entirely horrible -- in the £1 bin at the Age Concern charity shop next to the Manchester train station, and I figured I could hang it up in the Zeroday's bathroom while I showered to steam out the worst of the wrinkles before I went to the court.

Jem and Rabid Dog were watching a video on Dog's laptop in the front room when I got in, all bundled up in blankets and cuddling. A couple months before, I'd have been embarrassed for them -- or for me -- but I'd stayed on so many sofas and floors in the past couple weeks that I was beyond embarrassment. Besides, these were my chums and they were making one another damn happy, so what kind of bastard would I have to be to object to that?

"The prodigal son," Jem said, as I stumbled in, rucksack on my back, clutching the carrier bag holding my court suit. "How were the crusades, then?"

I flopped down on the other sofa, which, for all its smelly horribleness, was still an absolute delight of familiar homeyness. "I'm beat, lads. Got to be in court in eight hours, too. It was an amazing time, but Christ, I feel like I've been beaten with sticks. Big ones, with nails through them."

Dog snorted. "No you don't," he said.

I waved at him. "Yeah, no I don't. Poetic license. No offense meant." As far as I knew, he was all healed from his beating, but his nose would never look the same again, and he had some new scars I'd noticed when he was making a dash from the shower to his bedroom. But the beat-down had changed him, made him a little less playful, a little more militant. Jem had told me that Dog figured if he was going to get gay-bashed, he might as well stop pretending he wasn't gay. That made a certain sense to me.

"Well, there's some concentrated cold-brew coffee in the fridge," Jem said. "Experimental batch. Strong stuff. Help yourself tomorrow, but go easy. It's the kind of stuff that might make your heart explode if you get too much in you."

"You, sir, are a scientist and an angel of mercy," I said, hauling myself off the sofa and starting up the stairs, noticing that they were dusty and dirty. It had been my month to do the floors, according to the chores rota. Just one more thing to do after this stupid court business.

I set two alarms -- one on my lappie and one on my phone -- and set them half way across the room so I'd have to get up to get to them. Then I slept like the dead.

Jem hadn't been kidding about the cold-brew coffee. I'd had a milk-glass full of the stuff, eight or ten ounces, and had briefly entertained having a second, but I decided to just get a move on and dash for the bus. By the time we entered Shoreditch, I felt like all the small muscles in my feet and hands were contracting and releasing in waves, and it felt like my ears were sweating. I was very glad I hadn't had a second coffee!

Gregory met me outside the courthouse. He was wearing a much smarter suit than mine, and he shook my hand warmly, then led me inside, through a metal detector and security check, and then into a crowded room filled with various coppers, fixers, and crims like me, looking uncomfortable in their suits or miserable with their weeping families. There were also loads of men and women in long black robes and ridiculous wigs. At first I thought they were all judges, and then I realized that one of them was 26's stepfather, and he was headed straight for us.

He shook my hand distractedly, then caught me staring at his wig and smiled wryly. "You see what we have to do, we poor barristers? Don't worry, I won't be wearing it for your hearing; I've just come from a full-dress drama, a bit of housebreaking. Proper villains. Not like your sort, Cecil. It's such a waste of everyone's time to send you through the system for a bit of downloading, when there's people accused of real crimes waiting to be tried."

I wondered if I should defend my honor by insisting that I was every bit the hardened bad guy, just as much as any of these arsonists, robbers, housebreakers, and murderers, but decided on balance that I preferred "harmless" over "convict."

"Right, this should be very simple and straightforward," Roshan took off his wig and robe and handed them to a porter behind a counter. "It's Dutta," he said to the porter. "Second from the left." Then he turned back to me without waiting for a response. "Simple. We go in, we explain that it's altogether too onerous to order you to stay offline because you can't possibly prepare a defense or work on your lobbying efforts without a network connection. You've got your list of recent appearances, yes?"